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A Taxonomy of Boxy Clothes

“The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”, wrote Hegel*, meaning that we can only understand a historical system once it has begun to decay. So it is with great sadness that I present for you here a precise taxonomy of the boxy-cut shirt, a fashion that I have loved for years. Built like Otho in Betelgeuse? Yeah, the boxy shirt is for you. I’m talking about a shirt with the same width at the waist as at the shoulders; a shirt cut straight across the bottom, not meant to be tucked in. A shirt that looks as good on a blustery, red-faced Australian sheep farmer as it does on you. Let’s pick apart the directions in which the boxy shirt style is moving.

There are three centers of influence in American boxy clothing. First, the British working-class center, typified by the mid-nineties Ben Sherman shirt (I haven’t linked to Ben Sherman, because their new line is 180 degrees different, meant for skinny wastrels with Caesar haircuts.) These no-nonsense, square-cut work shirts were favored by mods (and later skinheads) for their blue-collar ethos, much like Dickies in the US. Second, the skate punk center. It’s harder to identify pure skate punk these days, as fat pants have been adopted by many teen social groups. For our purposes, let’s look for the chain connecting the wallet to the belt, and for use of non-corporate graphic symbology. See Che Guevara with an X-box controller? That’s skate-punk.

Ganing momentum in the past two years, the West Coast Hot Rodder look is rapidly taking over the mall. Here’s where you’ll find the bowling shirt with flames on it, the boxy shorts with flames on them, or anything with a stylized crown. A lot of barrio culture went into this look, but soon it’ll be as redneck as a “no fear” sticker on a Toyota truck.

Now, most of what you’ll see out there is a combination of these three influences. Jesse James, for example, dresses like a skater, but he wears his watch cap pulled low in front (barrio), not up on top of his head (Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3.) Henry Rollins is a punk, but his wide pants and Ollie-friendly Vans shoes put him on the line where skater meets skinhead. And your freaky uncle in the merchant marine with the square beard and the Sailor Jerry tattoos is actually on the vanguard where hot-rodder meets the original Cockney working-class look.

Why do I care? Because I have to leave this space. I’m thirty-two years old, and every time I pulled on my Chochie Casuals shorts last year, the cool ones made from the Dickies workpants with the embroidered crown on the knee, I’d shake my head regretfully and realize I was wearing a teenager’s shorts. And not an especially cool teenager, either: hot-rod rockabilly is as dead as goatees or saddle shoes.

I could try to transplant myself altogether to the New York City Adult Male venn diagram, but a choice between Prada, Adidas, and Gucci does absolutely nothing for me. Darts in my shirts make me sweat, and I’m uninterested in wearing saucy Prada clamdiggers. Instead, I’ve decided to take the Duane Hansen route, achieving escape velocity on a collision course with the Ugly American Tourist.

Hence, my four-hour quest in New York City on Saturday to find a pair of white bucks with red soles to wear this summer. I checked all the hipster stores in Nolita: no luck. Each one of the thirty shoe stores on eighth street: blank looks from the attendants. Prada? No. Saks? No. Barneys? No. Bergdorf Goodman, for God’s sake? No. Clearly, I’m breaking new ground, here. That’s good news.

Ladies and gentlemen, I rode my motorcycle thirty miles to Lancaster, Pennsylvania this weekend to purchase a beautiful pair of tan oxford bucks with genuine red soles from a giant outlet store. In a field of giant outlet stores, in an area packed with fields of giant outlet stores. I was surrounded by senior citizens off the shopping bus, each of whom had been given a box lunch and a golf cart with which to drive from store to store. The shirts were boxy, the colors were bright, and a sense of hopeful optimism was in the air (“I think that Cracker Barrel will have chicken-fried steak at the buffet!”) I’ve found my new stylistic direction, a direction that’s fun, exciting, and age-appropriate, and made from low-maintenance, wrinkle-free synthetic blends.

I ask you to remember me five years from now when you see white oxford bucks at Hot Topic in the Short Hills Mall.

* One of the two quotes that philosophy majors remember after graduation, and throw around in coffee bars. (The other is Descartes’ Cogito, Ergo Sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Extra coffee-bar points for referring to the phrase as “The Cogito“, instead of just saying the damn thing.) Kate and I saw a sandy-haired philosopher in the Noho Star over the weekend, and Kate thought he looked familiar. Turns out he’s a barista at the Suburban Square Starbucks in Ardmore!

Kate and I went to Denver over the weekend for a family wedding. It was a glorious break from East Coast weather, and Hertz even had a convertible available. On the flight out, we got to meet the Amazing Bond-o Flight Attendant™ (pictured above).

We visited Rick and Mary, for whom Kate used to work at Pastime Software. When I met Kate, she was in charge of support for Past Perfect, Pastime’s hugely popular museum software product. They have a business model to die for: Rick is the tech guy — he has a background in telecommunications, and is a self-taught programmer — and Mary, with a background in museums, knows all the business processes. They work from their house, and charge small historical societies pennies on the dollar for complex DBA work. I remember my jaw dropping the first time I saw Kate writing complex merge/purge scripts in FoxPro — she was scrubbing the data for a West Coast indian nation, and she wasn’t charging the price of a small European sports car to do it.

The next day, we drove up into the mountains for the wedding, which was beautiful. The weather was dry, cool, and breezy, which is the most welcome alternative imaginable to Eastern seaboard humidity (I heard from my dad that English diplomatic staff used to get hazardous duty pay added to their paychecks because of the heat and humidity in Washington, DC.)

Afterwards, we met up with our friend Will Ronco. Will is trying to win enough triathalons this summer to get certified as a professional. He sometimes trains with Iron Man competitors, whom he describes as “passionately devoted to medium intensity.” Apparently, the Iron Man atheletes will pick an unexciting pace, then stick to it for hours and hours and hours. And they eat only healthy food, and watch only mild, unstimulating programs on the television. Will doesn’t like this devotion to medium, and proved it the next day when he blew away the competition and won a triathalon in Greeley the next day by, like, two minutes. [pictures of another race]

Kate, Will, Kate’s parents, and I all drove up to Estes Park to see more mountains and maybe some elk. Which we did, and smelled them, too, incidentally. Smelled like, um… elk. Finally, the next morning, we stumbled across a Model Boat Regatta in the artifical pond outside the hotel. There was a six-foot tanker, fully radio-controlled, all metal, and a tugboat with a working thruster that swiveled 360 degrees to give power in any direction (pictured on the right), and a WORKING SUBMARINE THAT SUBMERGED [more pictures]

So, all in all, I would rate this weekend as: pretty freaking great.

The Accidental Exhibitor

For once, the weather was nice this weekend. Well, all except for the torrential downpour that washed away the West Chester Business Improvement District’s “On the roof” party at the top of the High Street parking garage. The garage’s roof was nicely landscaped, with big piles of mulch that (unfortunately) washed straight into the drains, clogging them and making a knee-deep pool around the sushi bar. Kate and I went home and watched TV.

Sunday, I went to a car, motorcycle, and helicopter show at the American Helicopter Museum in West Chester. When I arrived, I was waved onto the airstrip exhibitor area by the staff. So my black, greasy BMW is now an accidental show bike.

See the slideshow!

Screw Defend Brooklyn, this stuff is way cooler.

Holy cow, LOTS more Anglophile graphic-design stuff here. Visit the Garage Company, and make sure to click on “Helmets”, “T-Shirts”, and “Decals”. I’m gonna get a new blue bubble shield for the Ultimate Water Gun. And some new T-shirts. DEFINITELY some new T-shirts.

British Action Adventure Marionette Theatre, and the sartorial choices it inspires



I was first introduced to the Thunderbirds by a six year old British boy in Newfoundland. He and his mother were visiting Peter Blodgett, legendary jazz banjo player, ex-RISD teacher, and noted crank, in Peter’s house at the top of Cape Nedwick in Trinity harbor (local pronunciation: “da nuddick”.) Peter’s the one who gave me the highly hip gold metal-flake helmet that’s currently in use on the Ultimate Water Gun. Anyway, the boy had a steel lunch box covered with pictures of steely-jawed marionettes wearing fast-food hats and beauty-queen sashes. They all were piloting blocky rescue craft out of an anglophile art director’s wet dream, and the effect was only enhanced by the young boy’s commentary on the show: (imagine a thick, thick, London accent in a piping declarative): “Thunderbird One goes into sp—y—ce, doesn’t it!”

Okay, so the sixties show was Highly Cool, and the lesson hasn’t been lost on twenty-first century show producers, who seem to be attempting to resurrect it, Power Rangers-style. Viz. the Burger King promotion advertised on their official site. Despite the Haim Saban effect, though, the show retains plenty of cachet. Kate tells me that Christies just sold some Thunderbirds marionettes for one bazillion dollars recently.

So here’s the reason I’m mentioning this: in a search for seventies-style Hepco and Becker panniers on the internet, I stumble across Davida Helmets, who make scooter-style “pudding basin” helmets and sixties-style “Jet” helmets that are clearly what the Thunderbirds would wear into sp—y—ce. I think that clique rules might forbid me from wearing a Brit-bike head kit (Jet helmet, Spanish octopus goggles) on a German bike, but, damn it, this is too good to pass up.

Check out the Davida Jets

I’m gonna see if I can drag Kieran and Jeremy to check out the helmets on east 56th street today. I suspect that the Jet will make my 7 5/8″ XXL head look like a ripe, round melon. But there’s always the James Bond option.

Next project: attaching a “Mr. Fusion” and a flux capacitor.

A BMW Airhead is the bike that you’d want to ride on some sort of time machine journey into the past, because there’s nothing on the bike that can’t be fixed (instead of replaced.) Everything on the bike is electric, not electronic, and even the diode board could probably be fixed with some kind of rare Aztec crystal that you’d have to rescue the high priest’s daughter to get. (Um, there’s a reason I haven’t been submitting my dreams to Genevieve for interpretation: they’re pretty easy to figure out.)

This weekend, I fixed the odometer on my bike. The numbers had been acting bizarre; four miles out of the previous owner’s driveway, and my 51,000-mile Airhead had turned into a 91,000-mile beater. Another minute down the highway, and I was the proud owner of a factory-original showpiece with only 1,000 original miles on it. This kind of wild fluctuation in the value of the bike is exhausting, however, so I decided to do something about it. Plus, the trip-meter was also broken, making the fuel range a matter of voodoo, not subtraction.

Members of the Airheads list sent me some detailed stories and instructions about how they fixed the same problem on their bikes, so armed with their messages plus my 800-page Clymer manual, I unbolted the instrument cluster and opened it up. No green etched electronics inside: just black Prussian plastic and blue Prussian bayonet lamps. Sure enough, the main drive gear (arrowed) had come loose on the shaft, failing to turn the numbers and also allowing them to separate, choosing whatever figure they felt like at the time. I pulled the shaft out, roughened it with a pair of Vise grips, reset all the numbers to zero, and tapped the gear back on.Voila, it worked!

And I still had time to put the instrument cluster back on the bike and drive away before the horde of feathered Inca warriors crested the hill.

Doesn’t the towel get cleaner every time I use it?


I came home with a box filled with bike parts yesterday: everything on my desk, in fact, except for the gallon of BMW Sucker Lube, which will require a separate trip. When I pulled into the driveway, the sun was still shining, the birds were still singing, and I dove into an old T-shirt to replace my fuel petcocks. Kate, who has more experience with after-hours bike restorations than I do, expressed some concern about my coming to bed reeking of gasoline. I swore some dark and bloody oaths that I would de-reek myself thoroughly when finished, stepped outside, and proceeded to pull the fuel tank.

Motorcycles, especially old motorcycles, are a kind of sponge made of aluminum and gasoline. Warner brothers would have had no problem making a cartoon of me, the Hapless Wrencher Trying Not To Get Smelly, as I promptly managed to dump a tablespoon of gas from the left float bowl onto my shoe. And dribbled a stream of gas down my forearm to my elbow, as I pulled the fuel line. And bathed my hands in a cold, greasy bath as I emptied the contents of the tank into a red plastic Jerry can. (Speaking of Jerry, our neighbor came and added to the excitement by standing nearby, calmly chatting and smoking a cigarette, causing cartoony beads of sweat to leap from my forehead.)

I managed to change the rubber sleeves connecting the carburetor to the air intake, and the cylinder head to the carburetor, which was very satisfying — the old rubber sleeves were old and busted, and crunched audibly when distorted. I also installed an inline fuel filter, which will help protect from trip-ending problems due to rust in the gas tank. Having had enough excitement, I put the dripping tank back on the frame (giving Jerry a wide berth), covered the bike against rain, and walked back into the house. At this point, visible stink rays were emanating from every part of my body. Kate and I have a very small house, and it only takes one or two stink rays to make a BIG difference in the internal atmosphere. Hands in pockets (to reduce the amount of surface exposure), I turned the bathroom fan on “high” and commenced emergency decontamination.

Here are the steps I took to try to de-stench myself:

• Scrubbed entire body twice with Dove moisturizing soap. Effect: none.
  
• Re-scrubbed using some kind of tea soap discovered in the hall closet. Effect: small reduction in gas smell, addition of tea scent.
  
• Washed hands and hair using smelliest shampoo in bathroom. Problem: household lifestyle choices do not include especially smelly shampoo. Effect: negligible.
  
• Exited shower, evaluated results. Problem: remains. Hands still gloved with hydrocarbons.
  
• Getting desparate, rinsed hands twice with Listerine mouthwash. Effect: bizarre.
  
• Washed hands four times with anti-bacterial liquid bathroom soap. Effect: even worse. Unrelated consumer product fragrances are beginning to interact, creating new and unsuspected smell possibilities.
  
• Grasping at straws, now. Used odd-smelling lanolin skin cream, purchased as an experiment and rarely used. Effect: bordering on theatrical.
  
• Further four washes with liquid bathroom soap. Effect: unchanged.
  

I walked to the living room (slowly, so as not to create telltalle air currents), and gingerly seated myself on the sofa. The cat, seated nearby, gave me a long, injured look and withdrew to the other end of the house. Kate, a longtime connosieur of garage stinks, conceded that the smell I had managed to come up with was, at least, new. Somewhere between mosquito repellent and Stilton cheese.

In future, I think that I had better confine my gasoline wading to mornings and weekends. And I’ll investigate heavily gendered barrier cream.

Spring is Sprung/The Grass is Riz/I Wonder Where My Latté Is?

The sun is shining in Philadelphia this morning for the first time in what seems like weeks (refer to Kate’s blog for a more thorough familiarity with misty weather), and all the garmentos on the train are in good spirits. Pulling into Thirtieth Street station from Ardmore, a pack of wholesale buyers were heckling a rumpled surgeon in the vestibule, feeling the fabric of his sweatpants judiciously between thumb and forefinger. “Are these domestic?” “You know, you really should wear a blue belt to match the back of your T-shirt.” Nearby, a woman who I recognized as a buyer for Forman Mills was joking about an upcoming wedding in the family. “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a closet!”

Today also marks an extremely important milestone: just minutes ago, the woman behind the counter at the Cookie Cafe in Thirtieth Street station ASKED ME IF I WANTED THE USUAL for the first time. Just like the Velveteen Rabbit, this means that I have now become “real.” You can’t rush breakfast-counter relationships. Some misguided gringos in Manhattan, for example, try to speak spanish to the guys behind the grill. “Gracias!” they’ll say, with an ingratiating smile, unaware that they have just made the transition to Giant Nine-Hundred-Foot Gringo. The last time I saw this happen, the guy behind the counter smiled back and waved. “De nada, bendejo!” he replied: “No problem, asshole!” and the six-foot blond guy picked up his bagel and left the store, humming a happy tune.

Overhearing this, I snorted my latte out my nose, which when noticed was my initiation into the twenty-sixth street deli VIP club (privilege of membership: able to nod at the counter staff over everyone’s head and get expedited service.) But that took two years. Now, I have a Breakfast Counter Relationship in philly (her name is Sinta), and the sun is shining and all’s right with the world.

Link of the day: X-Entertainment’s tribute to the Johnson-Smith Company

I’ve currently got the following on my white, kidney-shaped Herman Miller dotcom desk:

• Four quarts of 20W-50 BMW Engine Lubricant
  
• One quart of ‘Special Performance’ 80W-90 Hypoid Gear Oil
  
• One BMW hinged oil filter kit, in a white box marked “ein satz/made in Austria”
  
• One K&N High-Flow air filter
  

This particular collection of parts (UPSed from Bob’s BMW) marks me as a newbie, especially since I checked the back of the BMW-brand oil and it’s made by Spectro, so I’m paying extra to get my regular oil in a blue-and-white container. But I’ll know for next time, and meanwhile the collection of stuff on my desk is a welcome change from Matrix action figures and other standard-issue cube accoutrements. It’s nice to have a reminder that it’s actually possible to do things in the real world, like with your hands.

I’ve been invited by Snuffy Smith to ride out to the Ephrata meet this Sunday morning and meet a local Eastern European motorcycle guru, who cooks pastry. It’s something of a command performance, actually: Bob usually is politely reticent with the invitations, but this time the request was straightforward, and I understand that I’m to appear on time with new petcocks installed to stop the fuel leak from my left-side float bowl. If I want to hold my head up straight, that is.

The following image was sent to me by Fark-er Enselmo Boulavardier. I think it reflects our current national climate more accurately than the coy “Loose Lips Sink Ships” posters: